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BISDN: EICT spin-off founded

VISION AND MISSION

Create an open hardware platform for SDN-compatible data plane network elements based on ATCA/Blade standard This is a vendor independent modular approach for future cost effective and scalable networks. Establish an open software ecosystem for operation and management of network elements

The ecosystem can be extended and enhanced by several vendor independent parties and is thus supposed to compete with closed proprietary systems from established equipment manufacturers. The open source concept will be applied much like during the development of the Linux operation system. Development and distribution of market-ready SDN-capable network elements based on ATCA/Blade hardware which performance characteristics comply with network operator requirements. Necessary hardware modules (e.g., switching devices, processing engines) are available on the market in a multitude of variants.

MARKET ENVIRONMENT: The telecommunication market is characterized by the existence of different closed ecosystems of competing system manufacturers (e.g., Cisco IOS, Juniper JunOS).

Those proprietary systems hinder innovations in the telecommunication market and are supposed to bound network operators to the products of a single vendor/manufacturer. Software Defined Networking is currently evolving from an academic niche to a commercial available technology. The central idea of SDN in network elements is to separate the data from the control plane and to apply a standardized interface (e.g., OpenFlow, ForCes) to interact between them. Thereby, SDN enables the autonomous evolution of network elements and controller architectures.

SDN INDUSTRY: No SDN capable data path elements which comply with network operator requirements are available until today.Being a potential threat to the business models of established systems vendors, the supply of SDN capable data path elements with carrier grade performance is unlikely to be expected from these companies. Thus, apart from two spin-offs from Stanford University (i.e. BigSwitch and Nicira) five new startups aiming for the development of SDN based control planes were founded during the last months alone.

OUR SOLUTIONS: Our hardware platform enables the development and creation of various network elements, from simple layer2 switches up to complex service nodes, as well as their operation and management in the same open software environment. It also enables an easy high performance access to forwarding and processing engines for the support of novel complex SDN control planes over a unified hardware abstraction layer.

BENEFITS: An open source network operating system creates new opportunities for innovation through network operators, system manufacturers and vendors alike. Thus, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) can participate on such an ecosystem and provide products on the market equally to large companies.

On the other hand, using open source, network operators gain access to the network control software and can customize it to their requirements. SDN enables the parallel operation of different control plane architectures and a simple migration between them. This will increase speed and efficiency of service creation in the future.